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Peace Operations

After a more than a decade of continuous expansion, historic levels of demand and increasing operational complexity pose risks to the viability of peace operations. Setbacks in high-profile missions have coincided with military overstretch and growing fiscal austerity, while missions that have achieved interim stability lack a clear transition strategy towards sustainable peacebuilding and development. At the same time, the evolving use of a range of alternative models of peace operations, including the hugely expanded use of special political missions, is both creating new options and adding complexity to policy debates. At the UN and elsewhere, new questions about the relative merits of traditional peacekeeping versus lighter options create an ongoing demand for policy-relevant research. CIC aims to provide analysis on these issues and to improve conceptual and operational linkages across political missions, peacekeeping operations, and peacebuilding.

Related Publications

More than 20 years have passed since the United Nations (UN) first committed to achieving gender parity in its managerial and decision-making positions, but the organization still has a long way to go. Karin Landgren, a former senior UN official, provided the data two years ago to show that gender parity at the UN had become a “lost agenda” under the previous Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon. And in spite of a push to have a woman at the top of the UN hierarchy for the first time, the front runners in the Security Council straw polls for a new Secretary-General were largely men. (Perhaps Wonder Woman would have stood a better chance.) Yet the new Secretary-General, António Guterres, seems determined not only to talk about change but to effect it. After ensuring a 50/50 split in his own appointments at the senior level, Guterres has released this week the report of the Gender Parity Task Force: a far-reaching “System-Wide Strategy on Gender Parity,” which does not pull any punches in describing the current situation for women trying to make a career inside the UN bureaucracy.

On Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ first day in office, he signaled his intention to reform the peace and security pillar by immediately co-locating staff from the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and establishing an internal review team to work on the bigger proposals for change made by the High Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO), the Advisory Group of Experts (AGE) on the Review of the United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, and the Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. CIC supported some of the independent review team’s work through our report Restructuring the UN Secretariat to Strengthen Preventative Diplomacy and Peace Operations. The Secretary-General has now made proposals based on the team’s recommendation.

The UN Security Council has the potential to play a greater direct role in crisis response and mediation not only in New York, but in the field. It has done so sporadically in the past. In its early years, the Council experimented with inter-governmental missions to investigate potential conflicts and undertake mediation in cases including the Balkans and Indonesia. In the post-Cold War period, Council missions engaged directly in crisis diplomacy in multip=le conflicts, playing an important peacemaking role in East Timor in 1999.

Past Events

Paige Arthur, CIC Deputy Director, was a member of a distinguished panel of peacebuilding practitioners for the Initiative for Peacebuilding through Education’s 2017-18 academic year kickoff event, “Has Peacebuilding Failed? The Shift to Sustaining Peace”. The event was held at the NYU SPS Center for Global Affairs on September 15, 2017.

The people of South Sudan is suffering under a terrible man-made catastrophe where millions have fled from their homes and many face starvation. Ending the three-year-old civil war is the first step to solve the crisis, but negotiations, led by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), have faltered.